Tivoli Foundations Application Manager offers turn-key performance and availability monitoring for mid-market companies. It allows them to restore a service that is experiencing performance and/or availability problems with the shortest mean time to recovery possible.

Tivoli Foundations Application Manager also delivers real-time information allows an organization to visualize service performance and health across their network, server, middleware and application components enabling them to effectively manage risk and improve service quality.

Tivoli Foundations Application Manager helps clients optimize their resource allocation and reduce cost by giving them the ability to identify underutilized resources and reallocate them to support new business operations. At the same time, risk is reduced by anticipating resource over-utilization and generating proactive events and reports against resources that do not have the capacity to address growing business needs.

Tivoli Foundations Application Manager comes with out-of-the box best practice monitoring policies that track IT Infrastructure health against pre-defined thresholds. This allows organizations to quickly and proactively identify and respond to problems and issues before critical applications and customers are impacted. Overall service is improved by restoring the service or application that is experiencing performance problems with the shortest mean time to recovery possible using autonomic capabilities to fix problems before human intervention is even needed. Reducing problem determination time decreases cost and allows organizations to spend more resources focusing on business innovation and creating competitive advantage.

IBM Tivoli Foundations Service Manager

Tivoli Foundations Service Manager provides service desk capabilities that allow mid-size companies to handle help desk calls, track problems, and make changes that prevent existing problems without creating new ones. It also provides a self-service, searchable knowledge base that delivers fast answers to common IT problems.

The Tivoli Foundations Service Manager appliance-based service desk solution helps mid-market clients reduce their costs by optimizing the productivity of operations personnel through its built-in problem solving tools, providing operations a way to increase the efficiency of its service support functions. The robust self-help portal which is populated with best practice resolutions to common problems, gives end-users a way to quickly resolve problems on their own without having to involve any additional personnel.

Managing risk is key to small and mid-market clients that have extremely limited IT skills in-house. The Tivoli Foundations Service Management solution ensures process compliance by integrating standards-based incident and problem management processes resulting in a repeatable and consistent service support process.

Tivoli Foundations Service Manager delivers streamlined standards-based incident and problem management processes that enable rapid service restoration and improved overall service quality. It provides real-time visibility to end users on priority, urgency, and impact of problems, incidents, and service requests. These built-in survey capabilities allow organizations to track and trend overall end-user satisfaction with their operations and creates a closed loop environment where overall service quality can continually be improved.

Becauseservice-oriented
architecture (SOA) has emerged as a strategy many organizations are adopting in
order to respond more quickly and cost-effectively to customer needs, I really
wanted to understand what it was all about.

After reading many articles and talking with a number
of subject matter experts from IBM
Tivoli and WebSphere, here’s the information I pulled together.

Definition of SOA: Service Oriented Architecture
(SOA) is a method for breaking down large applications and business processes
into smaller “services” and a system for linking them on demand so they can be
reused to create new applications and business processes.

While not elegant or profound, this definition helped
me understand how SOA

provides organizations
with a dynamic infrastructure that allows them to break down large applications
and business processes into smaller, loosely-coupled “services” that can be reused
to create new applications and respond quickly to customer needs. The result is
a simplified, more powerful infrastructure in which services can dynamically
scale to meet changing organizational needs or workloads, while reducing cost
and management complexity.

With the tremendous value
SOA provides also come new challenges. Some of the challenges include managing
the complexity of deploying interdependent services, ensuring compliance with
multiple service level agreements for the same service, checking for the
proliferation of duplicate or overlapping services, and protecting a SOA
application and data from unauthorized access to name just a few. Meeting
operational goals in a SOA environment requires a new approach.

That’s where IBM
Service Management comes in. IBM
delivers offerings and services that span the entire service mangement lifecycle,
providing the visibility, control and automation needed to
effectively manage a SOA environment. IBM
Service Management solutions help organizations ensure compliance with multiple
service level agreements for the same service and track the interconnectivity
of loosely-coupled services to manage performance & availability.

Mid-sized organizations will benefit from the IBM Tivoli Foundations offerings - service management solutions designed and priced to meet the needs of mid-sized organizations. You can learn more at:
http://www-01.ibm.com/software/tivoli/governance/action/08202009.html

Every day, the world is becoming more instrumented, interconnected, and intelligent. Infrastructures and assets across the globe are rapidly being digitized, turning physical assets into smart assets that allow people, systems, and objects to communicate and interact with each other in entirely new ways.

This “smarter planet” is creating opportunities for new, smarter, differentiated services and products. Organizations that can rapidly adapt and innovate to meet or exceed customer expectations for new services and products will be in a position to accelerate growth and gain competitive edge.

Watch this video to see how smart meters have made a significant impact on Portland General Electrics business.

Business and operational audiences often lack the visibility they need to more effectively manage their business objectives. They frequently have an obscured view of their business and IT assets and how they come together to support services.In addition, processes and workflow are often disconnected across organizational boundaries.

The result is lost opportunities and an inability to meet or exceed critical business objectives.If you cannot see your assets, and their relationship to the service you are delivering, you cannot respond quickly to new opportunities or to problems when they arise.The lack of adequate governance across asset types (business & IT, People, Information) leads to unnecessary risk and an inability to effectively meet compliance and audit requirements.Further, if you cannot manage assets effectively across organizational boundaries, it’s difficult to lower the return on those assets, information and people and effectively manage operational expense.

Business dashboards display service performance in a business context showing KPIs that include transactions, customer activity, and other key metrics. Dashboards pull information from both business sources and IT sources, then connect and display the information to show not only how IT is performing but how that performance is impacting these key services.

In addition, operational dashboards show the technical status of business services and the supporting infrastructure. These dashboards can be used to visualize emerging technical problems, and business impact—in many cases, prior to customers even becoming aware that a problem exists.

Subsequently, they can isolate service root cause, identify problem owners and guide them through resolution.

See the results of improved visibility. Watch this video to find out how Star Technology used IBM Service Management to manage and monitor their IT systems—servers and network—and their non-IT systems—air conditioning units, UPS, chillers, interfacing with their building management system for alerts.

Every day, the world is becoming more instrumented, interconnected, and intelligent. Infrastructures and assets across the globe are rapidly being digitized, turning physical assets into smart assets that allow people, systems, and objects to communicate and interact with each other in entirely new ways. This “smarter planet” is creating opportunities for new, smarter, differentiated services and products. Organizations that can rapidly adapt and innovate to meet or exceed customer expectations for new services and products will be in a position to accelerate growth and gain competitive edge.

Watch this video to see how smart meters have made a significant impact on Portland General Electric’s business.